Reflections on Communication, Education, Scholarship, and Life

Reflections on

Communication,

Education, Scholarship,

and Life

Xin-An Lu

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Reflections on Communication, Education, Scholarship, and Life

All Rights Reserved © 2003 by Xin-An Lu

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Contents

PART I

1

Human-nature Communication

2

Nervousness and Stage Fright

3

Purpose of Rhetoric and Language

4

The Web and a Sense of Home for Overseas Chinese Students in America

5

The Study of Attitude and Human Communication

6

Scientism and Humanism—On Reading Weaver’s Theory on Rhetoric

7

Survey Report on the Topic of Effective Leadership

8

Personal Transformation and Organizational Effectiveness

9

How Communication Empowers Change

10

Humor in the Multicultural Experience

11

Barriers to Genuine Communication

PART II

1

The Purpose of Social Sciences and the Current Condition of Scholarship

2

The Dynamics of Human Attention

3

The Direction of Our Education

4

Questions and Reflections on Students and Education

5

The Organization of Education

6

Motivation in Learning

7

The Mission of the University

8

The Sense of Home and the Personal Classroom

PART III

1

Life, Turning Points in Life, and Suicide

2

Individual Needs and Group Goals

3

Religion as Remedy to Social and Individual Problems

4

Success and Failure

5

Childhood Dreaming

6

On Pursuit of Joy in Life

7

Is This a Free Society?

8

Is It Busyness or Business?

9

A New Humanism against the Societal Panopticon

10

Manifesto of the Individual of the New Millennium

11

Let our God Watch over our Dog: Heidegger on Pessimism and Optimism about Technology

12

Some Reflections on Technology

13

Modern Scholarship Should be a Bridge between Scientism and Humanism

14

The Despotism of Group Values and the Condition of our Life

PART IV

1

Prejudices and Discriminations in China

2

The Fifth Discipline in the Context of Chinese Organizations

3

Uncensored Web Publications and Chinese Democracy

PART I 

Communication and Leadership

1

Human-nature Communication 

Human-nature communication may be considered as one directional transaction, in which humans bestow their feelings and emotions upon nature. Nature, then, in the human eye, becomes alive. Nature begins to seem anthropomorphic insinuating into every delicate subtlety of the human emotion and idea. Nature in history has been the intimate confidante to many philosophers, writers, and poets.

Religious communication may be considered one form of human-nature communication where God is the medium of Nature. Religious people may disagree since they would consider God as an entity of blood and flesh. Yet, to my knowledge and understanding, no one has been able to communicate with or to be in the person of God. Thus I consider God still as one form of Nature. Human-nature, or, to some, human-God, communication seems to be purer, more direct, and lucid in that this communication is not burdened with complexities and intricacies of human-human communication.

We can only open ourselves and communicate well by connecting ourselves with an agent and then we may be able to transcend the reality (present customs and conventions) and the noise from the human receiver. Interpersonal communication, in the present world, can hardly promise genuine freedom of expression and even freedom of thought. Too many factors get into the way: ubiquitous stratification of power differences, concern of others’ perception of oneself, need to belong to a group, concern about the impact of one’s own message on others, protection of one’s job and marriage, social taboos, and myriad of other human-created norms and institutions. Complete freedom in thought and communication may be only attainable in human-nature communication where the human is in complete spontaneous charge. Here, the human will feel a flow of communication—a naturally occurring and self-directing action. It can stay as close to the innermost strings of the heart as the present second to one’s breathing; it can go as far as to the most remote time and place in that the human communicator’s imagination is blocked by no human-created machinations. This flow of communication represents one that is free; when an object can move with freedom without friction, it promises the highest level of energy and power. This assumption is historically testified. Countless thinkers in history found it imperative to detach themselves from the worldly society and attach themselves to nature, through the medium of which they can incubate and nurture and mature their thinking and the expression of their thinking.

Human-nature communication is pure, not contaminated by human societal conventions or values that may be just expedient products of human imperfections, conditioned indolence, and even morbid intentions. In human-nature communication, the human can design and build her own model according to her own aspiring ideals. The form follows the idea instead of the other way around, as happens all the time in human-human communication. The human can always revise the model if she finds it going even slightly away from her ideals. When communication is free from conventional customs and values, the human begins to feel as if responding to the ultimate righteousness instead of to the mundane righteousness conditioned by societal artifices. Human-human communication can never sprint; it can only hobble at its best, in that, for one thing, human-human communication has to heed stipulated norms, forms, styles, specifications, jargons, validity as understood by hair-splitting ped-ants...Our society is far from being a product of our ideals. Our society is still a product of our very imperfect interactions. Our actions and interactions more often than not are not directed by our ideals and consciousness, but by mere expediencies and nonchalance. Consequently, we unconsciously let our externally conditioned actions and interactions guide us and what we produce are reactions subsequent to these actions and reactions. This is too bad, because what we are supposed to do is make building blocks for our ideal castle and put them in the desired structure. This is perhaps why some say every individual is good. When individuals come together, they become bad because they then become directed by their interactions instead of by their conscious ideals. This is also why communication can become very frustrating and even destructive of the human-human bond if we forget what we are communicating for and let communication become something for its own sake. A careful reflection and analysis of human norms and artifices is likely to reveal that the bulk of human cultural and societal contrivances are but to make human-human interactions controllable or expedient for those in power rather than to facilitate the birth of genuine human ideas and ideals.

We should never let communication be representative of the communicator. Communication is only the bridge or the vehicle through which the communicator tries to arrive at the home of his ideals. That is, we should never judge a person by how he communicates, but by what he communicates; not by the medium of communication, but by the message of communication.

Too frequently in our life, we forget our purpose and our task. Then we begin to judge and get judged by the way we communicate rather than by what we communicate. This human folly may be epitomized in scholarly publications, the bulk of which serve no other purpose than get someone to the next rung along the spectrum of artificial denominations and get some more pages (fraught with coherent insignificances), bounded in a nice-looking volume.

Human-nature communication is desirable and welcome. It is largely free from the danger involved in human-human communication. Even intra-personal communication is less desirable than human-nature communication. Intra-per-sonal communication is still one between two people—the true self and the social self. The social self is a hard person to communicate with because its face is hard to decipher and its intention hard to interpret. Human-nature communication is one with the true self via the facilitative medium of nature, neither of which (nature and the true self) is contaminated by social contrivances. More importantly, nature responds and teaches the communicator in a purely honest and inspiring way and in a slow yet melodiously persuasive way.

Human-nature communication often is a spiritual journey toward the dreamland, a promise only by the ultimate and unquenchable human aspirations. It is no exaggeration to claim that many monks and nuns actually feel less lonely and more inspired with time. Judged by conventional thinking, they should be more and more lonely with time. (Yet conventional thinking to me more confuses than explains.) Our understanding of evidence has long led us to confuse psychological conditions with physical realities; the feeling of leisure and busyness, for instance, is by no means a physical reality, but purely a psychological condition. The fact that the majority of our fellows feel they are very busy does not indicate that we are doing and producing more, but that our society is debilitating and emaciating.

Human-nature communication is a nurturing process, a process of growth. In this communication, enough time is allowed for dreams to be birthed, clarified, expressed, and reified. It is only not until you have your aspirations and purposes clarified and reified, can you find clear means to realize them. The image of purpose in human-human communication has long become blurred. We spend the bulk of our waking hours to do things simply because these things are ubiquitous instituted human practices. A careful reflection of the purpose of these things will

not uplift you to the sunlight mount of hope and energy, but will quickly plummet you to the abysm of confusion and pessimism.

Human-nature communication teaches us what we should teach in our communication courses. What matters are not mechanical skills but lasting and heartfelt values, beliefs, ideals, and dreams. Mechanical skills in communication, if not armed with beliefs, can never escape getting finally killed by conventional and powerful communication practices everywhere around us. I believe skilled communicators, often represented by great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., are not people with skills but people with beliefs and aspirations. For effective communication, we should have an agent or buffer between the speaker and the listener. The agent or buffer is not skills but beliefs. Skills can never help you transcend bad responses in communication that may immediately abort the attempt for better communication. It is beliefs that transcend, edify, and transform. Real learning is not a matter of dealing but one of transcending and finally being. All commercial textbooks for the basic communication courses are largely failures (achieved with multi-hundred-page pomposity and vacuity) if the purpose of the course is to transform and edify the learners’ communication beliefs and practices.

2

Nervousness and Stage Fright 

Nervousness is but natural, yet we sometimes need to learn to act unnaturally to be up to great occasions. When we first learn to play the violin, being clumsy is natural. We have to be unnatural with the fingers for a long time so that we can eventually master the sublime naturalness of virtuosity. Fear is natural, but people grow by learning to overcome fears. Also, before you can do something, you have to be that. For example, before you can be the president of the nation, you probably have to speak, act, and be like the president. Later on in our life we will realize that most fear and nervousness we experience is but self-imposed. People in this world around us are too busy to care about nervousness from you.

One other thing that helps overcome fear and nervousness is our psychological relationship with the external and internal world. I found that if I detach myself from the external world, or from what is, and attach myself to my internal world, or to the world of what could be, I begin to feel a communion with my message to communicate. My heart and body are with the message instead of with the audience. Communion with the internal message of my dreams, plans, and aspirations will uplift me with energy, poise, and presence of mind. Communion with the audience just injects into the heart fear and self-consciousness. Good public speaking should be an externalization of some fiery passion and plan. If it is just a wish to appear nice, to successfully perform some task, or to please some people, no excellence would be achieved in public speaking.

3

Purpose of Rhetoric and Language 

The purpose of rhetoric is to clarify and unify by seeking the truth. For this purpose, language should be as direct, simple and unembellished as possible.

My topic on the purpose of rhetoric apparently sounds too broad to be one for a student paper, but I believe the study of purpose should be the first step for all sciences. A unified purpose defines, thus clarifies, thus unites, and thus directs. We define first and then see (Oliver, 1961, p. 31). One of the biggest problems with modern humanity sciences is that they produce interminable controversies because they use too many definitions. Too many definitions absolutely do not define. It seems that, in our time, the more you study, the less you know. The end product of scholarship can easily become agnosticism, which is only made to appear scholarly through arcane language and narrowed logic. All this is a clear symptom of lack of a primal, unified purpose. This lack plagues us with a plethora of definitions. A plethora of definitions only produces a great mass of controversies. A great mass of controversies only confuses instead of edifies, making it impossible for us to poetically dwell on the earth (Heidegger, 1977, p. 316).

Therefore, before studying rhetoric, let’s ask this question: What purpose should rhetoric serve so that it clarifies and leads instead of confuses and misleads? One way to endeavor for an answer to this question is by examining what purposes are implied behind different definitions of rhetoric.

Definition one:¹ Rhetoric is the practice of (effective) oratory. The purpose of rhetoric implied by this definition is contained in the purpose of oratory. To Cicero (1990), effective oratory should be able to teach, to move and to delight. To delight itself is an end, but what needs a further answer is the question of

teaching what, and moving the audience towards what. To Aristotle (1990), oratory is the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion (p. 153). Although some rhetoricians assign a purpose to oratory (e.g., Aristotle and Augustine), this definition itself does not imply a subject matter for rhetoric or a purpose beyond persuasion, which can be highly situational.

Definition two: Rhetoric is the use of language, written or spoken, to inform or persuade. According to this definition, language apparently serves as the means or the tool. Thus language can be formed, deformed or embellished in whatever a way that can serve the purpose of informing and persuading. Thus language can be used not only to reveal but also to conceal information so that it informs in the way desired by the informer, speaker, or rhetor. Thus, to persuade, language can be manipulated in such a way that it plays best with the audience’s emotions and logic, which more often than not are conditioned by the audience’s current social situation. This definition